Welcome To The Hermit's Desk

It is a little after 5 AM. I have been up every hour, on the hour, for the last seven hours. With luck, the next time I lay down will take. If it does, I'll likely sleep 12 hours. If it doesn't, I'll be unable to speak coherently for the exhaustion.

It's not always "the devil you know." I know both of these devils well. It's simply the devil that gets you first.

I came upon an older Livejournal entry, written about 3 years ago, in which I extolled that I'd already done the majority of the soul-searching I'd need to do in my life. It sure seemed it at the point, having been able to pack away the long train of traumatic events onto shelves in my mind, out of the way my feet walking from room to room. I truly felt that I had all it all figured out.

Ha. Fate has the most selective hearing EVAH.

I also used to joke that whatever would do me in would have nothing to do with the bad habits of my youth. "My drug use? The needles? The booze? All of that - it will be something else, completely COMPLETELY unrelated, something COMPLETELY random, that does me in,"I told Pat, doubled over in laughter. How COULD my death or bodily troubles be anything but a direct result of my own bodily abuse? To suggest otherwise was to be completely ridiculous.

Again, it turns out Fate has ears EVERYWHERE. I try not to get into verbal sparring spats with Fate anymore, but (1) I'm a snarky asshole by nature and (2) Fate works in ways that can't be predicted. Who the hell knows what I'm saying NOW that Fate will shove into my life ten years from now? Impossible to predict and thus impossible to speak for now or to keep quiet about.

Again, I am superstitious, not religious.

I came upon something much darker a couple of days ago and having been to trying to process it. To put it where it belongs, to where it makes a full picture instead of an unwinding quilt of threads shredding themselves this way and that way.

My suicide attempt in March was not as random an impulse as I've wanted to believe it was. It was not as much a casual slip-up of thoughts as I've wanted OTHERS to believe. It's so hard to admit this. Everyone can forgive a single, drug hazed mistake (to which with all the drugs I was prescribed, I WAS in a drug-hazed state), but the more the look back, the more I realize the drugs wasn't what did me in.

It was me that nearly did me. Me, thoughts, and fears, and strangely enough, my resentment. In March, about a week before I decided to make a dinner meal out of an entire bottle's worth of sleeping meds, I wrote this on my Lupus Support Group.

"A month ago, my blood pressure dropped fatally low. It had done so in my sleep. My boyfriend, noting how pale, cold, and unresponsive I'd become in the night, had called 911 and was told that had he not done that, I would have **died**. It put a rightful scare in me. I was also surprised to find that through that scare and the gratitude at being saved was twisted a small feeling of resentment.

Things had been going so poorly - and still continue to be poor, eight months after diagnosis and endless hospital admissions (I've spent well over two months total sitting in hospital beds). Technically things are "improving", in that my kidney numbers and nausea symptoms are improving greatly, but it has not translated into a Happy, Healthy Quirkytizzy yet.

I am tired of feeling so unwell, so consumed by feelings of anger, confusion, and sorrow. I would have considered it a blessing to pass away in my sleep, even as young as I am at 35.

And while I am grateful - terrified and grateful - to have gotten a literal second chance at life, a part of me resents my boyfriend for having saved my life. Saved my life for what? For years more of this endless treatment where the cures are worse than the disease? For decades more of dealing with people rolling their eyes when I have to spend yet ANOTHER day in bed, all day?

I didn't know how to deal with this resentment. I am so grateful to be alive, but at the same time, a small part of me wishes he had not called 911. At least I would have gone peacefully.

Has anyone ever felt anything like this? I understand just how selfish it is for me to feel this way, but I feel what I feel. In true honesty, I would not have wanted to die.

But if I'm being honest, a part of me would have welcomed it.Am I alone in this feeling????"

That was such a huge warning flag that I'd unknowingly raised. My own journals, littered over and over with phrases like "I don't care anymore, there's never going to be a good day, why am I bothering to live like this?" were also signs.

Never having before been suicidal myself, I didn't stop to think about these being things that were placing myself in imminent danger. I thought that these were just normal parts of the grieving process.

I was so ashamed at feeling anything but gratitude for Jesse saving my life. I struggled because what good person feels upset when someone you love loves you so much that they LITERALLY save your feel life?

I'm now thinking it's not so much that it makes me a good person or a bad person, just a person in desperate pain.

I mean, really, how DO you tell your loved one that you want to be be with them for the rest of their lives, but goddamnit, couldn't you have just left me die in peace"? The two thoughts do not mix and all that happens is that hurt and rejected feelings ripple endlessly through the lake once that stone is hurled into the waters.

I suppose the progress is this: I no longer resentment him for saving my life Like, at all, not even a little bit. Given time, treatment, and a maddeningly slow but noticeable uptick in health, being alive is becoming at least a little more attractive. Without him, I literally, as in would have been buried almost six months ago, would not have had that chance.

It all just so clearly outlines the idea that suicide attempts don't just "happen." There are warning signs. Personal and often tailored to a person specifically. A person can go weeks without writing so much as a FB post, but if I go more than a week without posting on LJ, we know something is wrong. Your mileage may vary, but it's still a car, and we're still all stuck riding in them.

At least now a days I have a much better idea of what requires immediate attention and what doesn't.

I guess it's something a lot of sensitive people deal with whether we realize it or not. As the world gets worse, the harder it can be to deal. Suicidal feelings are hard to deal with but it's easier when we choose to, for whatever insane reason, to keep pushing on.

Pointing that out, yes, it's right, whenever you didn't write anything for days without a note before like "I'm out of town for the weekend" or so, it always was like a sign before something happened to you. No matter what it was, if either caused by yourself or by the disease combined with the meds. You personally aren't the type for being silent for days...

It might be that this suicide stuff will still keep you busy for a while, as the cause of it is not gonna vanish.If you have troubles analyzing or insecurities about when to ring the emergency alarm, just know your places where to address and speak about it SAFELY (SAFELY is a very big deciding factor in this; as those who can talk about their inside life more often without too much censorship, they're less up to any mischief or something they could later rue - compared to people who always have to live under threat of being taken into wards only for taking that word into their mouths; SAFETY is a thing that just makes constructive work possible despite dark thoughts or a dark mindset - without it, the real core never gets addressed and it's able to keep spinning its circles deeper and deeper).If somebody says it's a sin, then he's an idiot. You're looking for things getting better, so when you do something in order for things to get better, there's almost nothing that's prohibited. Fuck that cowardly chicken shit...

Oddly enough, suicide is more often an act of anger than of despair. Sure, depression has an effect: one needs to feel as though they would be better off (or that it wouldn't matter if they were) dead, but it requires a certain amount of anger to kill someone, even if that person is yourself.

I fear death far less than mortality. I don't want to die -- never have; I'm addicted to finding out what happens next -- but it still scares me less than growing old, incapable, dependent, incompetent in a world that seems to care significantly less with each passing decade.